Feature Request: Allows Habits to be Organized into Hierarchy (Sub-Habits)

[minhphamswe]

This is a request for discussion of a feature request. More details below.

Summary

Allows each habit to specify one or more parent habits. A entry for a habit would also count for its parent habits.
In habittracker blocks, habits with parents can be organized in a tree pattern, with the parent habit on top and its children below and indented.
Habits that have multiple parents can appear multiple times in the habittracker block.

Use Case

Imagine you want to track your exercise habit. You create a habit called "Exercise".
There are different forms of exercises you do: weight-lifting, running, and yoga. They all fall under "Exercise", but they serve different purposes, so you may want to make sure you track their streaks separately.

Currently, you have 2 options:

1. Track all exercise habits under "Exercise" habit. There's no easy way to separate instances of different forms of exercises.
2. Track each form of exercise under its own habit. It's harder to see at a glance how often you are exercising.

With this feature, you can do this:

• Create a parent habit "Exercise"
• Create 3 habits: "Weight Lifting", "Running", "Yoga", with "Exercise" as their parent habit
• Track each exercise form separately and have their instances count for "Exercise". You can also check "Exercise" for a generic exercise that doesn't fall under any of the defined sub-habit

[zincplusplus]

Oh, I love this one. People keep surfacing use cases I never imagined back when this was just a little spreadsheet habit tracker. Thank you for that!

It's a valid idea and I want to support it. The main thing I'm weighing is how to visualize it. One option is a collapse/expand interaction (the rollup as a parent you can drill into), but honestly that comes with a level of complexity I'm not too excited about. lean toward something simpler: "Exercise" is just a habit that rolls up several others, rendered as a normal row.

Concretely, the rollup habit's frontmatter would point at its sources:

rollupOf:
  - habits/Gym.md
  - habits/Yoga.md
  - habits/Running.md

All the usual settings still apply: custom color, maxGap, title, and so on. The one important difference: it's read-only. A rollup row is derived from its sources, so you can't click to toggle it directly. You tick Gym/Yoga/Running and Exercise reflects that automatically.

Does that match what you had in mind? And does the flat read-only row work for you, or were you picturing an expand/collapse view?

[KatK333]

As a different solution to this, what about being able to create habittracker code blocks that point to different path folders/files as their source?

For example I could make a file called Habit Tracker that points to the Habits folder to track general habits, a file called Mood Tracker that points to a different folder where I can add files to track mood, a Workout tracker file that points to Workout folder with specific exercises etc.

It seems like this would make the plugin extremely flexible for all kinds of uses though I'm not sure how complex a change that would be. Love the base the base plugin though thank you for making this!

[ajitzero]

rollupOf:
  - habits/Gym.md
  - habits/Yoga.md
  - habits/Running.md

Just adding my thoughts on the YAML structure:

I envisioned something like this where only the Habit files exist, and the Grouping file is optional.

Walk.md

title: 10k Steps
group: Exercise
color: blue

Yoga.md

group: Exercise

And Exercise.md doesn't need to exist, but if it did, it may simply look like:

type: group
color: red

• type: 'group' | 'habit' with @default 'habit'
• color can specify a common color for all habits in this group, with overrides at the habit level still working. So in above case, Walk is still blue, but Yoga gets the red from Exercise.